Gulag collection

July 29, 2004 — 10.00am

Rare music that was scorched by the Stalinist era is in need of cultural asylum, writes Helen Womack.

In a flat on the edge of old Tallinn, Mark Matsov paces and broods among the scores and recordings of his late father, the conductor Roman Matsov. Tourists carousing in the restaurants have no idea that nearby is the library of a man who struggled for musical freedom in the depths of Stalin's dictatorship. But Matsov's work to preserve his father's legacy is under threat.

Estonia has become a member of the European Union and the pre-Communist owner of the apartment has returned and wants a market rate for the rent. "I cannot afford to stay here beyond October," Matsov says. "The tapes are old. They will disintegrate if they are not transferred to CD and DVD."

Matsov is seeking a cultural asylum where the archive can be kept for posterity. His father and the famous composer Dmitry Shostakovich, and the little-known pianist Maria Yudina, had a pact to rescue religious and modern music from Stalin's Gulag of the arts.

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The world knows how Shostakovich - much decorated and at the same time threatened by Stalin - was forced to behave like a court jester, speaking bitter truths for those with ears to hear. But only specialists remember Yudina, thrown out of the Moscow Conservatory because she dedicated her playing to victims of the regime. And Matsov snr, the youngest of the dissident trio, paid a high price for helping the other two as he was banned from travelling abroad and spurned by official recording studios.

Roman Matsov, of Baltic-German descent, was born in 1917. He studied violin and piano in Tallinn, Berlin and Leningrad. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, he fought on the Soviet side. In action near Leningrad, he was wounded in the right arm, a disaster for a violinist and pianist. Instead, he went on to become conductor of the Estonian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

He studied in Germany in the late '30s and hated fascism, says his son. He wanted to defend Russian culture and fight against the anti-human nature of Nazism. As for Soviet totalitarianism, he did not immediately understand that Stalin was a devil.

In 1949, Mostav and his wife Asmik were living in Tallinn in the flat of an Estonian, Maert Raud. There was a knock on the door in the middle of the night, says Mark, and the NKVD (forerunner to the KGB) came for Raud and his wife. "Mum and dad told Maert, 'Run down the back stairs, they have come to arrest you'. By this time, they understood what country they were living in. But Maert said, 'I have done nothing wrong, why should I run?' "

The Estonian couple were sent to their deaths in Siberia. Shostakovich, of course, had since the 1930s known perfectly well what country he was living in. He had already experienced the horror of having Stalin himself dictate vicious newspaper reviews of his work.

All of Shostakovich's friends had been shot. Although he continued to be paraded before the world as the great Soviet composer - and especially after he wrote his war symphonies - he feared he could become Stalin's next victim. And so he chose Matsov to become his secret conductor.

Matsov was the one who knew the composer's real intentions when official musicologists insisted on hearing only the trilling sounds of nature and anti-Nazi themes in the works. Matsov would be the keeper of Shostakovich's music, if the worst were to befall the composer.

The arrangement was that whenever Shostakovich premiered a new work in Moscow or Leningrad, Matsov would immediately perform the piece with his orchestra, thus ensuring that it was recorded by the radio station in Estonia. If the work was subsequently banned - and Shostakovich's works were banned in 1948 - there would at least be a copy safe in Tallinn.

Everything that Shostakovich ever wrote, Matsov performed and recorded. Tapes were often wiped at the radio station because there was a shortage and they had to be re-used. But Matsov smuggled the Shostakovich tapes out under his jumper, and the surviving tapes are in the archive along with scores annotated by Shostakovich.

Matsov also brought to small Estonian audiences the works of many composers whom it was impossible to hear in the rest of the Soviet Union. There were bans on modern composers as well as on the religious opuses of Bach and Handel. Censors reasoned that it did not much matter if a few hundred Balts heard a live concert of a Bach mass, but Matsov was never allowed to make records that could have been distributed across the Soviet Union.

To this man in 1951 came Maria Yudina, deprived of her living as a pianist because she dared to combine music with human rights advocacy. The pianist Svyatoslav Richter was surprised at the strangely tragic way she played Bach in the 1940s. Well, she retorted, there was a war going on!

A photograph of Yudina shows the world-class pianist dressed like a bag lady in an old coat and canvas runners. Matsov promoted her whenever he could.

The archive also contains three symphonies that the world has never heard, by the unknown (outside a small circle) Estonian composer Heimar Ilves.

In Soviet times, Ilves was expelled from the Tallinn Conservatory for his religious faith. He lived in extreme poverty; he made salads from dandelion leaves. He also had incredibly large feet and could never find shoes to fit.

Matsov jnr puts a tape in the video of his father in old age, conducting an Ilves work at a concert. "What do you think?" he asks. It is not easy to make an instant judgement. But the thing is, I feel I want to listen again and again. There is something very haunting about these long lost melodies, reaching the modern listener from the Gulag of Soviet music.